


Too Long Alone

by AnotherLoser



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Depression, Grief/Mourning, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-07 22:36:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8818822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherLoser/pseuds/AnotherLoser
Summary: He’s been like this for too long.  In this place.  With these people.  Feeling the way he does.





	

He’s been like this for too long.  In this place.  With these people.  Feeling the way he does.

Alone.

Mick has learned to maintain a tipsy state as much as possible in his attempt to numb himself.  He drinks, he eats, he fades into the background with little to say but some sarcastic comments here and there.  No opinions, no advice, no suggestions.  They wouldn’t listen anyway, so why bother?  Or maybe he just doesn’t care to put in the effort.  Both are just as likely.

He’s been going through the motions.  Keeping the team alive when they need his help, doing what he’s told, staying out of trouble.  Keeping to himself.  
It’s interesting how one’s world can come crashing down.  In many ways it had already happened.  Before Leonard’s death Mick was working to burry as many memories as possible from the day he was taken from the woods and until his return.  He was trying to sort out what was real and what wasn’t of the past before that thanks to what the Time Masters had done to his memories.  He wasn’t doing well.  And then Leonard chose to die in his place where he was surely meant to go.

Mick didn’t belong on the team.  Never had and never will.  He was so lost with himself he wouldn’t know what to do when he got back to Central.  When the missions was over, Time Masters gone and Savage killed, he had nothing left. He couldn’t face Lisa after what he’d done. After her brother saved his life and died doing it.  He didn’t speak to her.  Didn’t even let her know he was back.  And soon enough he was given hope in the form of Ray Palmer; the only idiot that didn’t look at him like a moron still.  Mick can see it in people’s eyes.  He saw it from day one with the Legends and back then, in the start, it didn’t matter, but eventually it did.  Ray though got over it in a few days.  That stood out.  Taking a beating for him too.  Coming to talk to him after he lost Leonard, and then tracking him down back in 2016.  It all meant something and despite how little interest Mick had in someone like him as a partner of any caliber, Ray still held hope for Mick that he wouldn’t be entirely alone.

And then they got on the ship, and sometimes Ray still talks to him, but as soon as _Pretty_ was on board Mick was thrown aside the rest of the way.

Figures.

He should have seen this all coming, really.  It isn’t the first time he’s been depressed.  As a child he was scared shitless of life and himself after he killed his family.  How could he not be?  
He grew to accept himself for who and what he is.  It took years, but he did it.  Every now and again he’d start to slip, start to get bad and that wasn’t even including the pyromaniac spells where he didn’t care about dying in fire as long as something burned.  No, depression was different than blinding impulse.  He doesn’t call it such, just like he doesn’t call his phobia of cold a real phobia.

He knows though what those things are.

Just like he still knows things Chronos was taught without thinking about that time at all.  He _knows_ but refuses to think the full thought.

Sort of like how he finds himself disappointed when a live-risking situation doesn’t get the better of him, and yet refuses to actually think a full sentence about wanting to kill himself.  Out of sight out of mind.  Just like Chronos... But Chronos does come out at night still in the form of Mick’s dreams.  His nightmares.  Things the Time Masters had shown him to make him compliant and numb; killing everyone he knew, hearing them spit hate at him, watching them die, watching them bring down the final blow to himself, any combination in any scenario imaginable.  He’s seen it all.  He relives it when he dreams.  And when he’s awake there always has to be a time where he wishes for death.  Wishes Leonard had let him die at Oculus instead.

Mick didn’t belong with the team.  Mick couldn’t and wouldn’t go on to do great things.  All he wanted was destruction.  Leonard had new goals and ambitions that he could have gone after if he had lived and Mick knows in the back of his mind that only one of them would do good things, even if he was too happily selfish to _want_ to do good anyway.  It made Leonard worth more.

And then Leonard decided that Mick was.  Mick was worth saving.  Worth sacrificing his own life for.  
Mick still doesn’t understand it.  
That’s the first time he felt his world truly crash.  Finding out that what he’d believed as Chronos was a lie, that was shocking- devastating, even, in some ways.  But Leonard’s death….  He lost the only thing he had left.  The only person he had to begin with.  And it wasn’t even worth it.  He wasn’t worth that.

Still isn’t.

Never will be.

Everyone knows it.  Amaya tries to get to know him, unaware of... Anything about him, really.  Ray seemed to have given up on being his friend after Mick let him blow up the coldgun.  Funny how someone determined despite rejection before would pull away as soon as Mick shows a trusting gesture..  The rest don’t even think of him as more than a wild dog needing to be tamed, a pain in the ass that needed to be looked after or else destruction would take over.  As if he quite literally was nothing more than Leonard’s guard dog that therefore now has no master.

It’s been too long.

He’s too tired.

 

Sitting here now, Mick thinks back to years past.  He thinks he has most of his memories sorted out, and knows what was still skewed by the brainwashing.  It wasn't easy to shake what had been forced on him; the idea that his entire life with Leonard was spent being manipulated and used.  It was bending the truth without making new memories or making old ones go away.  It was brilliant on their part.  For him it was horrible.  Still horrible.  
But he's getting there.  He is, and now he thinks on the night that he ran to Leonard's house in an attempt to beat the rain.  Leonard was outside of the farm town Mick grew up in, in a decent neighborhood at the edge of the city.  It was a long walk but they always made it work and when Mick was trying to outrun a man he'd pissed off he went down the path he'd memorized to get to Leonard's.  He left the guy behind in a mere minute, but he kept on running.  He was thrilled and cold and hoping to not end up freezing but for whatever reason he was mostly just happy for the first time in what felt like forever.  He still ended up soaked to the bone, borrowing Leonard's clothes and a towel and shaking under a blanket all night but his smile never faltered and he taught Leonard how to make _real_ hot chocolate for the both of them.

He thinks back to their first successful jobs, the first crime spree across the country, the failures, the birthday mornings where he'd suffer through Leonard's shitty pancakes just because his friend made them for him. He thinks about the good and some bad and mixtures of both because that's how their relationship was. He thinks about the various points in his life where he lived alone. He has good and bad memories of those too.

Reminiscing isn't a bad way to go out. Better than while surrounded by the team, Mick thinks.

He looks at the empty bottle of booze beside him. Then to the ring that used to belong to Leonard. Mick wears it around his neck most days, on a little silver stolen chain and tucked into his shirt. He put it on his hand for this. Finally he pulls the matches out of his pocket and thinks with an eery sort of calmness that in flames is a good way to stay true to himself in this moment. So he lights one up, and throws it into the backseat of the car he's stolen while the others were running around doing who knows what.

The smell of gallons of gasoline burning is a comfort. More so is the smoke and the heat rising around him. May not be the most peaceful way to go, but it fits Mick nicely.


End file.
